How many of us believe poetry is useless? How many of us don’t even care to ask the question, “Is poetry useless?”
Disney Is Buying Up All Our Pop Culture
“Disney remains intent on discovering, rescuing, and rehabilitating precious pop culture artifacts so they can be found or rediscovered by audiences around the world—a modern-day Indiana Jones, indeed.”
Amy Tan On Writing “Microscopically”
“I’ve found that the way to capture the truth of a character – and beyond that, to reflect the truth of how I feel – is to write microscopically. To focus on all the tiny details that, together, make sense of character. Each person’s perspective is absolutely unique; my job is to unearth all the specific events and associations that form an individual consciousness.”
I Will Not Be Ashamed of Loving “Love, Actually”
Emma Green counterattacks in the Love, Actually wars at The Atlantic: “I admire the bravery that’s needed to declare oneself the enemy of Christmas, Colin Firth, and crushes nurtured by 11-year-old kids, and it would be cowardly to hide behind the movie’s cute-factor in mounting my defense.”
Stop Saying ‘Love, Actually’ Is Romantic – It’s The Opposite
“What does Love Actually tell us about love, actually? Well, I think it tells us a number of things, most of them wrong and a few of them appalling.”
Upworthy Style Headlines Have Colonized Our News Feeds. Why?
“If you want to understand why the Upworthy style is suddenly everywhere, you start with a program that controls what millions of people see and read everyday—and which very few people understand.”
Think TV Is Fading Away Because Young People Have Abandoned It? Don’t Be So Sure
Teens watch more TV than we – or they – may think.
How Cats Infect Our Brains (And Maybe Make Them Better)
Some of the side effects may be pretty great, but (as they said in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), “it is technically brain damage.”
What’ll Be The Real Problem For Amazon’s Delivery Drones? Angry Birds
And these predators are not drones.
Saint Nick’s Evil Sidekick
“While Saint Nicholas may bring gifts to good boys and girls, ancient folklore in Europe’s Alpine region also tells of Krampus, a frightening beast-like creature who emerges during the Yule season, looking for naughty children to punish in horrible ways – or possibly to drag back to his lair in a sack.”
Performing The Vagina Monologues In China
In fact, performers and activists have been presenting Eve Ensler’s script in the still-socially-conservative People’s Republic off and on for a decade now – with widely varying responses from officials and audiences alike.
Can You Distinguish Blue From Blue?
In a blog entry rendered entirely in verse, Robinson Meyer points us to an online quiz testing your ability to tell one shade of Silicon Valley’s favorite color from another.
How Will – Or Can – We Preserve The History Of Video Games?
“We should preserve the apparatus of a game, but it’s impossible to save the culture of a game, which is really the most important part.”